On Teaching Kids The Finger

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“Way to parent,” my brother-in-law told his wife very, very recently. Apparently he wasn’t overly thrilled with her latest parenting effort.

We knew it was going to be a good story when there was an attempt to remove our kids from the room.

“You kids go away,” said Tracey’s sister to Master10 and Miss8 this evening. We were sitting in the kitchen having a cuppa and a natter. “I need to swear.”

It must be said there was a distinct lack of hustling: Nice to know it’s not just when I tell these kids to do something.

But to be fair, they had a good reason for remaining where they were.

“You can’t say anything worse than Mum does,” said Master10, while Miss8 nodded vigorously behind her. I might have been nodding as well.

“Fair enough,” said their Auntie when neither Tracey nor I attempted to contradict them, then she leapt into storytelling mode.

It turns out her two kids have been having trouble saying finger.

“They keep saying thinger,” she said, following this up with some examples. “My thinger hurts. I cut my thinger. He’s pointing his thinger at me.” She sighed. “It was driving me insane.”

When I was young I had a similar issue with pronouncing the ‘ph’ sound.  In fact I was in my late teens before I worked out the Thantom was actually the Phantom. I still maintain Thantom sounds better.

So anyway, my sister-in-law decided to teach her kids a witty little ditty for them to remember the correct way to say thinger. She’s a problem solver, this girl. Although it’s probably a good thing she didn’t go into children’s speech therapy.

“Repeat after me,” she told her boys when they were in the car, “it’s a farking finger. A farking finger. A farking finger.”

Unsurprisingly they got it in no time at all (as, I suspect, have our two), and were keen to show their new skills off to their dad on the very next trip to the shops.

Which I think was why she was over having a cuppa with us.

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 ~ raising a family on little more than laughs ~

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